Romney won't dump Trump

Donald Trump is once again, out of nowhere, dominating the 2012 campaign. But this time, he’s overshadowing the GOP standard-bearer who also happens to be his own pick: Mitt Romney.

More than a year after Trump made headlines doubting President Barack’s Obama’s birthplace and claimed to have investigators on the ground in Hawaii, Trump is essentially dismissing the legitimacy of the commander-in-chief’s birth certificate, asserting the president was clearly born in Kenya and “told the truth” to a literary agent who listed him that way two decades ago.

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So far, Romney is staying mostly silent on those claims — saying he can’t control his supporters.

Trump’s comments to the Daily Beast last week came just as the Romney campaign was touting the real-estate mogul as the fundraising counterweight to George Clooney, promoting a “dine with Mitt and Donald” contest to raise money for the Republican’s coffers.

The Donald is also hosting a high-dollar fundraiser for Romney at his Las Vegas hotel tonight, along with Newt Gingrich (who himself spent months stoking questions about the president’s sympathies with people of the Muslim faith) — providing a high-profile joint appearance on the heels of Trump’s latest declaration, one that Democrats are calling on the Romney to denounce.

“He didn’t know he was running for president, so he told the truth,” Trump said about Obama’s birthplace, basing his assertion on a literary biography written for Obama that was recently unearthed by Breitbart.com. “The literary agent wrote down what he said… He said he was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia… Now they’re saying it was a mistake. Just like his Kenyan grandmother said he was born in Kenya, and she pointed down the road to the hospital, and after people started screaming at her she said, ‘Oh, I mean Hawaii.’ Give me a break.”

When pressed by reporters on his campaign plane, Romney on Monday shrugged off Trump’s renewed birther theories.

“You know, I don’t agree with all the people who support me, and my guess is they don’t all agree with everything I believe in,” Romney said. “But I need to get to 50.1 percent or more and I’m appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people.”

Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom on Friday, in a CNN interview, said the candidate has made clear that he accepts where the president was born, and that the election will be focused on the economy. But he did not criticize Trump.

The Trump drama is yet another twist in a 2012 cycle that has been dominated by pseudo-surrogates — Hilary Rosen on the left, Rush Limbaugh on the right — in which each side demands the other denounce the words of someone with a tenuous connection to the campaign. The latest example was a proposal to a super PAC, led by businessman Joe Ricketts, seeking to sell attack ads featuring the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (it was rejected).

But in this case, Trump is an actual Romney surrogate — one who has recorded robocalls for the presumptive GOP nominee, hosted a fundraiser for his wife Ann in his Fifth Avenue home, and pressed the candidate’s case on Fox News and elsewhere. The mogul’s brashness — and willingness to take the fight to the president — was what made him appealing as a potential presidential candidate himself to the GOP primary base last year. That very same boldness is the quality Republican voters have long questioned in Romney.

“I’ve been known as being a very smart guy for a long time,” Trump told CNBC on Monday. “I don’t consider myself birther or not birther, but there are some major questions here that the press doesn’t want to cover. Now, if that were somebody else they’d be covering it and they’d be throwing people out of office, but they don’t want to cover it.”

The GOP base still gets stoked by the attack line about Obama’s birth place. And it was striking the extent to which Republicans interviewed for this article gave Romney public cover for his association with Trump and viewed Romney’s connection with Trump as a net-plus for the campaign.

One invitee to today’s Las Vegas event went even further.

Former Nevada Gov. Bob List, a former Republican National Committee member who lobbied on Romney’s behalf during the raucous negotiations surrounding the Nevada caucus, said “there is still a mystery” surrounding the president’s citizenship.

“There may be people who support President Obama who think he was born in Kenya, I don’t know,” List said. “There still is a mystery. There is a certain mystery about Mr. Obama, some intrigue there, driven I think mainly over his secrecy about his college records. Maybe he claimed to be a foreign student for purposes of admission to college, I think that’s kind of where this thing has drifted.”